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A Combinatorial Miscellany

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A Combinatorial Miscellany A Combinatorial Miscellany Anders Bj¨orner1 Matematiska Institutionen Kungl. Tekniska H¨ogskolan S-100 44 Stockholm SWEDEN Richard P. Stanley2 Department of Mathematics Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139 U.S.A. September 13, 2004 1 Introduction. A recent newcomer to the the center stage of modern mathematics is the area called combinatorics. Although combinatorial mathematics has been pursued since time immemorial, and at a reasonable scientific level at least since Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), the subject has come into its own only in 1Partially supported by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley, CA). 2Partially supported by NSF grant #DMS-9500714. 1 the last few decades. The reasons for the spectacular growth of combinatorics come both from within mathematics itself and from the outside. Beginning with the outside influences, it can be said that the recent de- velopment of combinatorics is somewhat of a cinderella story. It used to be looked down on by “mainstream” mathematicians as being somehow less re- spectable than other areas, in spite of many services rendered to both pure and applied mathematics. Then along came the prince of computer science with its many mathematical problems and needs — and it was combinatorics that best fitted the glass slipper held out. The developments within mathematics that have contributed to the cur- rent strong standing of combinatorics are more difficult to pinpoint. One is that, after an era where the fashion in mathematics was to seek general- ity and abstraction, there is now much appreciation of and emphasis on the concrete and “hard” problems. Another is that it has been gradually more and more realized that combinatorics has all sorts of deep connections with the mainstream areas of mathematics, such as (to name the most important ones) algebra, geometry, probability and topology. Our aim with this article is to give the reader some answers to the ques- tions “What is combinatorics, and what is it good for?” We will do that not by attempting any kind of general survey, but by describing a few selected problems and results in some detail. We want to bring you both some ex- amples of problems from “pure” combinatorics, some examples illustrating its interactions with other parts of mathematics, and a few glimpses of its use for computer science. Fortunately, the problems and results of combina- torics are usually quite easy to state and explain, even to the layman. Its accessibility is one of its many appealing aspects. For instance, most popular mathematical puzzles and games, such as Rubik’s cube and jigsaw puzzles, are essentially problems in combinatorics. To achieve our stated purpose it has been necessary to concentrate on a few topics, leaving many of the specialities within combinatorics without mention. The choice will naturally reflect our own interests. The suggestions for further reading point to some more general accounts that can help remedy this shortcoming. 2 With some simplification, combinatorics can be said to be the mathe- matics of the finite. One of the most basic properties of a finite collection of objects is its number of elements. For instance, take words formed from the letters a, b and c, using each letter exactly once. There are six such words: abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba. Now, say that we have n distinct letters. How many words can be formed? The answer is n · (n − 1) · (n − 2) ··· 3 · 2 · 1, because the first letter can be chosen in n ways, then the second one in n − 1 ways (since the letter already chosen as the first letter is no longer available), the third one in n−2 ways, and so on. Furthermore, the total number must be the product of the number of individual choices. The number of words that can be formed with n letters is an example of an enumerative problem. Enumeration is one of the most basic and im- portant aspects of combinatorics. In many branches of mathematics and its applications you need to know the number of ways of doing something. One of the classical problems of enumerative combinatorics is to count partitions of various kinds, meaning the number of ways to break an object into smaller objects of the same kind. The study of partition enumeration was begun by Euler and is very active to this day. We will exposit some parts of this theory. All along the way there are interesting connections with algebra, but these are unfortunately too sophisticated to go into details here. We also illustrate (in Section 11) the relevance of partitions to applied problems. Another, more recent, topic within enumeration is to count the number of tilings. These are partitions of a geometric region into smaller regions of some specified kinds. We will give some glimpses of recent progress in this area. The mathematical roots are in this case mainly from statistical mechanics. Combinatorics is used in many ways in computer science, for instance for the construction and analysis of various algorithms. (Remark: algorithms are the logically structured systems of commands that instruct computers how to perform prescribed tasks.) Of this young but already huge and rapidly growing area we will give here but the smallest glimpse, namely a couple of 3 examples from complexity theory. This is the part of theoretical computer science that concerns itself with questions about computer calculations of the type “How hard is it?”, “How much time will it take?” Proving that you cannot do better than what presently known methods allow is often the hardest part, and the part where the most mathematics is needed. Our examples are of this kind. To illustrate the surprising connections that exist between combinatorics and seemingly unrelated parts of mathematics we have chosen the links with topology. This is an area which on first acquaintance seems far removed from combinatorics, having to do with very general infinite spaces. Never- theless, the tools of algebraic topology have proven to be of use for solving some problems from combinatorics and theoretical computer science. Again, the theme of enumeration in its various forms pervades some of this border territory. Our final topic is a glimpse of progress made in the combinatorial study of convex polytopes. In three dimensions these are the decorative solid bodies with flat polygon sides (such as pyramids, cubes and geodesic domes) that have charmed and intrigued mathematicians and laymen alike since antiquity. In higher dimensions they can be perceived only via mathematical tools, but they are just as beautiful and fascinating. Of this huge subject we discuss the question of laws governing the numbers of faces of various dimensions on the boundary of a polytope. To understand this article should for the most part require hardly any knowledge of mathematics beyond high-school algebra. Only some details in the boxes and in the last few sections (having to do with topology) are a bit more demanding. 2 Partitions. A fundamental concept in combinatorics is that of a partition. In general, a partition of an object is a way of breaking it up into smaller objects. We will be concerned here with partitions of positive integers (positive whole 4 numbers). Later on we will encounter also other kinds of partitions. The subject of partitions has a long history going back to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) and Euler, and has been found to have unexpected connections with a number of other subjects. A partition of a positive integer n is a way of writing n as a sum of positive integers, ignoring the order of the summands. For instance, 3 + 4 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 4 represents a partition of 15, and 4 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 1 represents the same partition. A partition is allowed to have only one part (summand), so that 5 is a partition of 5. There are in fact seven partitions of 5, given by 5 4 + 1 3 + 2 3 + 1 + 1 2 + 2 + 1 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. We denote the number of partitions of n by p(n), so for instance p(5) = 7. By convention we set p(0) = 1, and similarly for related partition functions discussed below. The problem of evaluating p(n) has a long history. There is no simple formula in general for p(n), but there are remarkable and quite sophisticated methods to compute p(n) for “reasonable” values of n. For instance, as long ago as 1938 Derrick Henry Lehmer (1905–1991) computed p(14, 031) (a number with 127 digits!), and nowadays a computer would have no trouble computing p(1012), a number with 1,113,996 digits. It is also possible to codify all the numbers p(n) into a single object known as a generating function. A generating function (in the variable x) is an expression of the form 2 3 F (x) = a0 + a1x + a2x + a3x + ··· , where the coefficients a0, a1,... are numbers. (We call an the coefficient of n 0 x , and call a0 the constant term. The notation x next to a0 is suppressed.) The generating function F (x) differs from a polynomial in x in that it can have infinitely many terms. We regard x as a formal symbol, and do not think of it as standing for some unknown quantity. Thus the generating function F (x) is just a way to represent the sequence a0, a1,.... It is natural to ask what advantage is gained in representing a sequence in such a way. The answer is that generating functions can be manipulated in 5 various ways that often are useful for combinatorial problems. For instance, 2 letting G(x) = b0 + b1x + b2x + ···, we can add F (x) and G(x) by the rule 2 F (x) + G(x) = (a0 + b0) + (a1 + b1)x + (a2 + b2)x + ··· .
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